The Deeply Strange Saga of the Quazy Quaids

What the hell's up with Randy Quaid and his kooky wife Evi? We sent Nancy Hass to Vancouver, where the Quaids are on the lam, to find out. She never did meet Randy, but she did talk to Evi. And boy, can Evi talk...

Somehow, it doesn’t seem as weird as it should that actor Randy Quaid and his wife of twenty-one years, Evi, are in Canada, fugitives from American justice. The 60-year-old Quaid, hulking older brother of Dennis, has always played twisted characters (Cousin Eddie in National Lampoon’s Vacation, an alcoholic crop duster in Independence Day, the homophobic rancher in Brokeback Mountain), so there’s a certain off-kilter poetry in his current role. He’s fleeing prosecution in California and seeking refugee status north of the border because he and Evi, 47, believe they are being hunted by Hollywood "star whackers," the same mysterious "they" who offed Michael Jackson and Heath Ledger and David Carradine.

Evi and Randy have been living in Vancouver, which in their case means holing up during the week in a luxurious downtown hotel room with their dog, Doji, attending immigration hearings. On weekends they take the ferry to Vancouver Island, where their endlessly patient attorney, Catherine Sas, lives in a quaint bayside cottage. She cooks for them as her husband, Paul, a retired aeronautics ecutive, looks on, shaking his head. "They like it here, it makes them feel safe," says Sas, who insists they are "more lucid than you’d think."

Vancouver Island, with its renegade vibe, suits the couple, who haven’t had a real home in more than a year and a half. Their expenses—they still rack up $400 dry-cleaning bills and indulge a taste for spa treatments—are paid by a trickle of residuals deposited directly with Sas. They risk forfeiting $1 million in bail by not returning to the U.S. for numerous hearings. "We’re looking at property on the western side of the island where you can just sit on the porch and let the storms wash over you," Evi told me over dinner at one of Vancouver’s priciest restaurants. She is clearly the alpha dog and self-appointed mouthpiece of the pair, though Sas says the two are "on the same page." They plan to support themselves by selling a memoir.

The couple’s first serious brush with the law came in 2009, when Evi was prosecuted after she and Randy skipped out on a $10,000 hotel bill at the posh San Ysidro Ranch in Santa Barbara. The Quaids are also personas non grata in Marfa, Texas, where a couple of years ago they bought property to build a museum honoring Randy’s career. After Marfa authorities arrested them in September 2009 for the San Ysidro Ranch incident, Evi painted a sign on a moving truck accusing the sheriff’s deputy of taking bribes.

Their latest legal troubles stem from an estate they bought in 1989 in Montecito, California, and sold in 1991. In September they were arrested for squatting in the guesthouse and causing several thousand dollars of damage, including scratching their names on the mailbox and destroying a $7,000 mirror. They insist the place is still theirs due to fraud committed by a cabal of agents and lawyers.

It’s hard to tell if the Quaids really believe the stuff about the star whackers "hunting them down," but a refugee claim could take eighteen months to wind its way through the courts. Meanwhile, Vancouver is a center of filmmaking, and Randy might be granted a work permit—if Canada doesn’t summarily boot him due to the felony charge in Santa Barbara. Evi, it turns out, has automatic citizenship because her father, who she calls "an artist who worked for the FBI," was born in Canada.

But two things that have not changed, despite their petty descent into madness: there may be no Hollywood couple more symbiotic, and they still love the cameras. Sure, they are now living out of a fiberglass pod affid to the top of their Prius, but they show up for hearings in Armani and Yves Saint Laurent. Evi, a fashion chameleon who briefly modeled for Helmut Newton in her twenties, sees each appearance as theater. Theater of the absurd, to be sure.

For a special GQ slideshow starring Evi Quaid, the woman behind—and usually way ahead of—her husband Rand, click here.

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